I found it much enjoyable then any other version of asteroids I've played. If you make it able to work on Java 5 then Ill play it at uni too But I found it did get a little repetitive still, if you going for something a little different I suggest adding more too it.For example adding a shield power up, different types of weapons. Maybe on some stages you need to protect something other then yourself like a planet or another ship. Could also add another type of asteroid like a iron core one, or have some other dangerous objects like a black hole

The physics feel solid and act mostly the way you'd expect them to (although sometimes the wrap-around kinda confused me (I bet that was a pain to code, btw)). Once or twice, I got stuck in the middle of a large cluster of asteroids, seemingly getting sucked in as soon as I hit it, but shooting my way out was easy enough.

It does get a bit repetitive, yes, and with 9 lives, you can go on playing for a long time.I only got two power-ups, rapid fire and spread shot (plus health once or thrice), and found them enjoyable. Rapid fire has a tendency to speed asteroids up to insane speeds, though.

If I may suggest features: (please ignore if the game is already complete)

Split the game up into three or four "worlds" of 8 levels each. Each world has a unique color, and perhaps different configurations of asteroids (plus world 2 is harder than world 1 and so on).Have a mini boss on level 4, and a final boss on level 8, each unique for each world.Add a scoring system, with combo bonuses and score power-ups.

Good stuff. Maybe the difficulty curve could be a bit steeper; although I liked the game from the start, it only really started getting exciting once I finally lost a life around level 20... Also, I guess I must've hit something by mistake, but the game started from the beginning with sfx and music disabled before I finished my go.

If I had to pick flaws (and, well, it's no fun if I don't) then they'd be the following:

Shooting big clusters of rocks is great fun, but shooting single rocks isn't. So each level starts off good but ends up boring. To be fair though, that's a problem with most Asteroids games.

There's so much moving around on screen that it never really feels like it's my fault when I get hit. The game lends itself much more to shooting than dodging. Odd suggestion, but I wonder whether it would perhaps work better if the player didn't have a ship -- for example, if it was more like a shooting gallery than a shoot'em up.

You're given way too many lives. I had to quit the game before I died because I didn't think my laptop battery would last till the end!

Hi - Thanks for all the feedback! Its always nice to here when people appreciate your work.

- I still considering about doing java 5 support, it should need many changes but doing all the QA again for java 5 will be some effort. Its a pitty that java 6 has been out so long but still not supported widly enough.

- The critizm is fair. The are a lot of lives and it takes a long time before the game gets challenging. You kind of have to get past level 20 before things start to get interesting.

- The game is complete but I'm looking to port to other platforms at some point and I want to do a sequal so hopefully I can take some of this feedback and used it in the future. I also want to do a couple other different games using the same graphics style.

- There is an issue on slower machines with Key Lag. I think thats why the ship reaction may be a little slow for some. If anybody has any good sugestions on the best way to deal with this, please let me know. Maybe I should ask in the appropriate sub forum.

- Sound gets automatically turned off if sounds processing is going to slowly. I might look into this a bit more and see if I can get sound to work on more machines.

I agree with the others that it felt a little bit long stretched, as Markus also pointed out it might be very cool to have a little bit more variation? For example different asteroid types, other enemies, colors etc. I dont know if you're familiar with Piranha? That was an asteroids game you could play with two players on one screen/keyboard, besides it being great fun to play coop with a friend, it had shops in between levels where you could upgrade your weapons with money you could collect from shooting asteroids (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/piranha/screenshots/gameShotId,3865/)... Those features gave the game excelent replay value!

I did write my own soft synth for the game. Actuall, the biggest part of the development time was taken up doing the sound and the sound engine. I decided to take my time to learn about sound in detail. I became really obsessed researching and experimenting with gutair strings, distortion, flangers, wah wah and trying to invent new ways of doing reverb. I wasted a lot of time but its good, I have a much better appreciation for sound in games now.

I was thinking a bit about grabbing one of the compressed sound players available for java but I was a bit nevous about them. Anyway, now I am happy to have a 45k downloadable java game with very fast loading times.

Brilliant looking and fun game. Well done! Just one thing. On my computer (Dell Inspiron 9400) I can't hold down Up Arrow + Left Arrow + Space at the same time (some sort of hardware limitation). I believe the limitation exists on many keyboards, so having the fire key as Ctrl or something other then space would be better.

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